Years ago, students would take placement exams when they enrolled in the community college. This was great for their education. They would spend a year or two getting to college level english and math.

That program is expensive and apparently made people “feel bad”. The colleges were no longer allowed to require placement tests. Then they were no longer allowed to offer remedial courses (courses that did not count toward a degree) and students went directly into college english and math.

The failure rates are astounding. About 1 in 3 at a large CC.

This issue is trickling up from k-12 being required to “pass” everyone to the colleges with that same pressure.

We need our policy to focus on education achievement rather than number-of-degrees. The incentive is short sighted and the ramifications could result in our local economies declining with ineffective employees, fewer successful businesses, etc.